Flora’s favorite Pennsylvanian gardener shares a spring day.
Lonicera sempervirens
This morning when I let the dog out onto the back porch to barf, the sky was just beginning to lighten, and I could hear orioles in the maple tree. Yippee! These days, when the baker gets out of bed to start his workday, the robins are already at it. This is 3am, or maybe 1am, I am not quite sure, because I am for the most part still sleeping.
Rafts of warblers have been blowing over in the spring rains. Today I finished my last two client gardens. I cursed my last lawnmower-man for mowing clippings into the beds instead of out of the beds. I peed my last desperate pee at the Pump ‘n Pantry after having held it for hours in a garden where the door was locked and the bushes were too thin for modesty.
From the final garden, my favorite garden, I helped myself to a little bundle of lily of the valley stems, because I knew my client wouldn’t mind. I threw them in my weed basket and they got all dirty, but that didn’t matter, because they were for Grandma, and she can’t see (but her sniffer still works just fine). We ate chocolate, talked about roasted lamb and peanut butter pie and a dog called Baxter, and smelled our fragrant flowers.
Lonicera sempervirens, trumpet honeysuckle, is budding up. It is native here, and this one came from cuttings of a plant that scrambled around at the bottom of my parent’s dirt road.
–Zoe Tilley Poster
I am a gardener by profession and pastime. I write about the art of cultivation, nature, and other items which take a brief roost in my brain before fluttering out the exit ear and away on the wind. I like to draw pictures, too. zoetilleyposter(at)gmail.com
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